Features are not progress

‘Users’ attention is a rare and precious commodity.’

Technology is a brilliant enabler, which is exactly why it is so easy to get overexcited by it.

I see too many media owners reach for their to-do list whenever a competitor launches something new. The question is rarely why the other company did it, or whether the same problem exists here. The reflex is simply to match the visible feature. Another version of the same habit is even more familiar: ‘now that we have this module available, let’s put it here, here, here and there’.

A content management system with a rich module list is not an invitation to fill every empty space on every page. ‘Related’ is a weak reason to add anything. Every new element needs to solve a real problem, and it needs to solve it in the right way. Otherwise, you are wasting your users’ attention and diluting your own resources.

A simple test helps: why is this here? If an element, page or workflow cannot survive that question, it probably should not exist. When in doubt, cut.

Jared Spool has an interesting theory about market maturity. He argues that most markets start with technology, move into features and checklist battles, and eventually arrive at experience.

A similar path applies to the people who build products. When a designer, developer or product manager starts sprinkling features around the interface, you can usually tell they are still somewhere in the checklist stage. It takes experience to get to the bottom of things. Solving a problem often means looking back into the organisation itself before anyone produces code, copy or graphics.

This is also where expectations get awkward. Many people assume more money should buy more web design: more buttons, bigger forms, longer feature lists, more pages. Good design often gives them the opposite. Fewer things, more clearly arranged, with a better reason for each one to exist.